The Quantified Self Movement Reaches Personal Finance

The next time you head to the mall in San Francisco (if
youre a person who still goes to brick and mortar stores,
that is), look carefully at the people you see. Try to spot
dark rubber bracelets about the width and thickness of a human
pinky. Those devices help the self-curious monitor their sleep
and their heartbeats and their diets and their breathing and
their steps per day  the list grows seemingly by the
week. Know thyself, insists one of the great credos of Western
culture.

In the most literal sense, those shoppers know more about
themselves from second to second than any other human beings in
history. That bracelet is called a Jawbone UP;
it and other products, from Fitbit and Lark, belong to a lifestyle movement called
Quantified Self (QS). Jawbone and its competitors use
accelerometers, actigraphs, GPS trackers and other sensors to
record a wealth of data not only about their users bodies
but also about their environments. Some QS adherents wear
automatic cameras set to snap a picture twice a minute,
uploading to the cloud all the visual memories they might have
missed the chance to notice.

So far, so boring. Most of us have seen The Truman
Show, the 1998 movie in which Jim Carrey plays a character
who is unknowingly living in a reality TV show with hidden
cameras all around. (In that vein, the Internet is currently
also circulating time-lapse videos of a years worth of
one young mans selfies.) Much more interesting than the
documentary impulse or the sheer mass accumulation of facts and
figures about any one human person are the ways in which
products like Jawbone UP go to work on the data they gather. A
Jawbone UP learns your habits and makes behavioral suggestions
delivered as e-mails, texts or push notifications. This is
self-knowledge made actionable. The Zeo Personal Sleep Coach,
an early QS success, sent regular e-mails to users about their
previous nights sleep patterns and claimed that 70
percent began to sleep better as a result of their
hyper-customized computer-derived recommendations. That Zeo was
forced out of business by a gang of competitors 
including Jawbone  early last year is only proof that the
lifestyle concept is going mainstream, as QS evolves into a
multibillion-dollar industry serving not only self-improvement
junkies but also ordinary folk who want to know how to live a
good life.

The tag line of the QS movement is Self Knowledge
Through Numbers. But its not the numbers that are
interesting. Imagine a whole fleet of virtual coaches and
personal assistants who learn to think like you, who interpret
the beating of your heart and your intentions and provide
hyperintelligent advice whenever you want it, in keeping with
all that is possible to know about you, your desires and your
goals. Personal assistants like Siri and Google Now are already
in the market, leading in strength and prominence dozens of new
smartphone apps that respond to queries spoken in plain English
based on your location and your previous searches. And these
applications will only get smarter, if we can extrapolate
anything from Googles recent purchase of London-based DeepMind Technologies, a pathbreaker in
machine learning  by which algorithms learn
to make predictions based on pattern recognition  and
systems neuroscience.

DeepMind and others want to build systems that act like our
own brains. Google, one suspects, wants DeepMind-caliber
artificial intelligence as a crucial component of projects like
its self-driving cars and its move into ambient computing
(tiny, linked computers scattered throughout the built
environment). But no matter what Google wants it for, we ought
to be massively excited about the development of good-as-human
thinking machines that we can use without expending any of our
own processing power, that communicate as rapidly as our cells
and that come to wise conclusions based on all of our
preferences  even those we might have forgotten or never
even expressed.

There are lots of things we dont think about as much
as we should, subjects whose demand on our time most people
understand as a direct detraction from quality of life. For
many, spending habits, taxes, credit rates and payments 
the full, complex armature of personal finance  are
primary among the necessary but unpleasant facts of life in a
money society. No one loves logging into their bank account,
but its our first, simplest, binary indicator of whether
we can buy or do something. Thus the relative success of early
personal finance applications like Mint, which
tracks spending habits, and BillGuard, which hopes to disrupt
everything from monitoring credit card bills for unusual
activity to sending users coupons and offers from merchants
they frequent.

Personal finance tools as they evolve will take this
technology much farther. GPS-based navigational systems have
both improved and become more ubiquitous as raw data have
become more available and the cost for both devices and
services has dropped. So too will personal finance apps begin
to follow us around. Theyll live in our phones or on our
wrists, pulling in real-time data to help us take control of
our own short-term liquidity and solvency needs and long-term
retirement goals.

This is exactly what mobile finance application wallet.AI founder
and CEO Omar Green hopes to achieve: As yet unreleased, his app
will understand who youre with, how much time
youre spending with them, what applications you might
have used on your phone to act as a smarter, financially
sophisticated you without requiring that you spend
any of your mental powers on it. In a recent interview with
NPR, Green even mentioned that wallet.AI may learn to suggest
that you spend less time with friends who often tempt you into
overspending. Hows that for a window into the future of
financial technology?

Green has been busy positioning wallet.AI as a wiser (but
not nagging) version of ourselves. As these technologies
continue to develop, it doesnt seem unlikely that
well end up trusting machines more than the people they
replace.

In the end, personal finance decisions, particularly those
relating to our income, spending and debt, will be made only by
first consulting the app. The rubber bracelet those Silicon
Valley mallgoers wear might tell them, with a gentle vibration,
that they just shouldnt buy the product theyre
looking at and instead save the cash for a more important goal.
Theyll save the cognitive resources  and the money
 for a better purchase some other day. One more step
toward a richer, tech-driven life.